


a familiar motif

by slybrunette



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-06
Updated: 2010-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-12 16:12:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Season Six finale. The world starts to gloss, the edges blur. And then her reflexes kick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a familiar motif

She doesn't breathe.

Her eyelids feel heavy and her limbs refuse to move if it's going to require so much effort.

She just relaxes, and where her skin should feel cold against porcelain it doesn't.

Everything that should be isn't; she's becoming used to this reversal.

 

 

-

 

 

"There's more."

Meredith's never heard Cristina this calm.

Her friend's hand slides along her arm, where blood-stained blue scrubs meet unmarred skin. It's an interesting contrast, stark blue and dark red against paler beige than usual. The clothes can be trashed, most of them, the rest of them can be washed. Erased. It's all relatively impermanent but her memories aren't.

"Where's my sister?"

It's worth noting, in the moment, the question isn't _where's Lexie_.

It's worth noting but that doesn't mean that she does.

"She's fine. I saw her earlier, with Mark."

Meredith blinks. Her mouth forms the first two syllables, the "why wo – " and then something sinks in and her stomach sinks along with it. Because she isn't with Alex and she was this morning.

Cristina's deadly calm adjusts to accompany her grim expression and then it all falls together to make a sick kind of sense.

 

 

-

 

 

Heart monitors scream upstairs, while she is down.

While she is trying to breathe outside the doors to the hospital, surrounded by a cloud of smoke that turns the air thick and stale. Turns it into ash in her lungs.

It shifts, too cold and too fresh on a sharp inhale, and her throat burns and her chest aches, and then she's bent over, throwing up into the shrubbery to the right of one of the benches down the walkway.

Her watch says six minutes after five.

Derek dies nine minutes after five, unexpected complications, while she's still outside listening to the whispers of the smokers and ignoring the pressure of wooden slats against her back.

 

 

-

 

 

She doesn't breathe.

Her eyelids feel heavy and her limbs refuse to move if it's going to require so much effort.

The world starts to gloss over a bit, fuzzy at the edges, and then her reflexes kick in.

Meredith breaks the surface, breathing in nothing but lukewarm water before she can, and her hands grip the sides of the porcelain bathtub. She breaks a nail because she digs in so hard and the palms of her hands hurt but she breathes, spits out a mouthful of water, and leans her head back against the rim of the tub.

She breathes and pulls herself up because there's no one else left to do it.

 

 

-

 

 

 

The hallway echoes to her.

Eleven steps between the bedroom and the bathroom, another sixteen to the stairs, and she learns to lengthen her strides.

She keeps all the doors closed, if only to preserve the illusion that there is someone on the other side of them.

 

 

-

 

 

Their funerals are two days apart.

In between, she attends Reed's, even if she didn't really know the other woman so well, and Charles' because Bailey seems broken up about that one the most and the list of people Meredith can be considered close to is dwindling so she might as well make do with what she has.

When Alex's is the one that she breaks down at, when his is the one she has to walk out of, trek back to her car and sit with the air conditioning chilling her skin straight through to her bones, people look at her funny. They act surprised. They are surprised.

His is the last. His is the last one that she has to be strong at.

His is the only one that she knows for sure would be unwelcome to the very person they're putting in the ground.

Alex hated funerals. He would've hated this one the most.

The passenger door opens and Cristina ducks inside, reckless with the hemline of her dress as it rides up on her thighs. She doesn't straighten it any more than Meredith wipes her damp cheeks with the back of her hand. No use in concealing what is already obvious.

"Let's get out of here," Cristina says, and Meredith starts the car without argument.

 

 

-

 

 

There are other losses that don't necessitate funerals.

 

 

-

 

Thatcher isn't in attendance but he sends her a card, the way a distant aunt or uncle would from across the country.

It's stark white and generic, _thinking of you in your loss_ on the front, and it should be the sentiment that stands out to her -- like they always say it's the thought that counts -- but her eyes find an error and stick.

Derek's name is misspelled.

It could be a simple mistake.

Except Thatcher really didn't know her at all, so why would he know the name of the man she loved.

The card sits on the kitchen counter for a week and when it falls off the edge one morning, knocked by her elbow, it lands right in the trash.

She doesn't make any move to retrieve it.

 

 

-

 

 

Addison hugs her at Derek's funeral.

It takes Meredith a moment to remember to wrap her long, skinny arms around the other woman's shoulders, but she does and inhales the scent of Addison's perfume, feels the ends of formerly red hair brush against her cheek, as she sighs and lets herself fall into it.

The action means more to her than the card from her father did, though she swears she reads something more in Addison's eyes than just remorse.

 _Thank god I left when I did_ , she imagines they say, in some morbid, selfish way, _thank god I'm not the one who has to pick up the pieces_.

Meredith should hate her because of it.

It's worse that she understands.

It's worse that she can't convince herself that her own eyes wouldn't reflect the same thing back, if the situation were reversed.

 

 

-

 

 

She can't remember the last time they kissed.

Meredith can remember with startling accuracy standing just inside her front door and telling him that very thing, but she can't remember the actual event itself.

It seems unfair, the way her memory hangs on the low points while their last kiss, the last time they had sex, the last time his hand slid into hers, fall by the wayside.

She thinks the walls might have been white, the clothes might have been blue, and now all of it is nothing but red.

 

 

-

 

 

Tequila always tastes too much like water, tongue heavy in her mouth, and she's sinking, holding on with fingernails digging in.

But she's holding.


End file.
